Ars Technica has the dirt on an admission from Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy: digital music downloads might not be evil, after all.

Just in case you don't know, Universal Music Group--one of the Big Four record labels--is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi. So this is a big deal.

As Ars Technica reports, Universal's music business is up 3 percent, halting a long-term slide toward oblivion:

Digital, of course, is the big driver of better economic performance. At Warner, for instance, it made up 20 percent of total revenues in the second quarter and generated 39 percent more income that it had a year before. Universal notes that its growth is fueled, in part, by "the momentum of digital sales growth."

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Matt Asay is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. Matt brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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